Schismatic Monk Faces New Extremism Charges
In early 2025, the priest was convicted of justifying terrorism, and now he faces charges under two new articles.
Jul 27, 2026 0
The hieromonk is already in the penal colony.
Source:
A resident of Verkhoturye, Yevgeny Pinchuk*, known as Hieromonk Nikandr, has become a defendant in another criminal case. In spring 2025, he was found guilty of publicly justifying terrorism and sentenced to imprisonment. Now the case involves two new criminal offenses.
The clergyman lived in Verkhoturye.
Source:
Pinchuk was born in 1971 in the town of Yalutorovsk, Tyumen Oblast. After moving to Sverdlovsk Oblast, he enrolled in an architecture institute, but in 1995 he left his studies and took monastic vows. The cleric belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR(A)) — a group that split off from the canonical Russian Orthodox Church. According to information on the website of this association, in May 2013, Hieromonk Nikandr was assigned to the Church of Simeon of Verkhoturye in the Ishim-Siberian Diocese, having transferred there from the Moscow Patriarchate.
Law enforcement officers repeatedly had questions for the hieromonk.
Source:
The new criminal case was opened under two articles related to online statements:
- «Public calls for extremist activity» (Part 2 of Article 280 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation);
- «Rehabilitation of Nazism» (Clause «c» of Part 2 of Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
Earlier, Pinchuk had already run into trouble with the law. In March 2022, he was fined under an administrative article for discrediting the Russian Armed Forces. Later, he became one of the first in the region to receive a criminal punishment for fakes about the Russian army (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The reason was a social media post in which the hieromonk made negative comments about the special military operation. After deleting the post and the account, he was still fined 100,000 rubles ($1,000 at current rates).
In autumn 2025, law enforcement officers again came to the priest with a search, after which they took him for interrogation. He was charged with publicly justifying terrorism (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The basis was a recording in which Nikandr spoke approvingly of the founder of a nationalist organization recognized as terrorist and banned in Russia. On October 17, 2025, the Verkhoturye Court sent him to a pre-trial detention center, and then the Central District Military Court of Yekaterinburg found him guilty and sentenced him to five and a half years in a general-regime penal colony.
Two years ago, a criminal case was opened against another clergyman from Yekaterinburg, Daniil Sidorov. He was accused of harassing girls and committing sexual acts: the man prevented passersby from going home, touched their hair and intimate parts. Metropolitan Yevgeny (Kulberg) of Yekaterinburg and Verkhoturye called the incident a «devil»s miracle.« As a result, Sidorov avoided trial by going to the zone of the special military operation.
* Included in the list of terrorists and extremists of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring).
Read more
